Successful stage actress Joan Leslie has devised a most unconventional way of ushering in the New Year, she murders husband. ( Louis Hayward) Overwhelmed by grief, guilt and remorse, her one resolution would be to relive the previous twelve months. Unlike most resolutions, which have either been binned or forgotten by mid January, Lesley receives the full monty, the whole of 1946 to make amends.
Already steeped in fantasy, from this point anything outlandish or outrageous becomes an out-take. The first impression is of a colossal missed opportunity to portray a mesmeric shift in lifestyle, resulting in radically different circumstances and outcomes. Further consideration reveals a harder truth, the grating realism of a loveless marriage, the overpowering influence of domineering peers and the frustration of dealing with others too spineless or stubborn to heed warnings. As the year proceeds, Leslie manages only a series of tweaks and fine tunings rather than a full service. Ultimately the movie descends into a catalogue of rancour and spite, punctuated by Hayward's drunken ramblings and Basehart's battle with mental health issues. Meanwhile, debonair Tom Conway provides the voice of calm and reason.
It's all professionally performed and fairly polished, but like the similarly styled, Velvet Touch, (1948) overly talky and mannered. It's not pretty, but it's not gritty either and you almost yearn for someone to break a leg in the literal sense to register some points on the action chart. For all its laudable intentions, not least the imaginative premise, Repeat Performance comes of as stiff, stilted and frankly too stagy....dahling.
Already steeped in fantasy, from this point anything outlandish or outrageous becomes an out-take. The first impression is of a colossal missed opportunity to portray a mesmeric shift in lifestyle, resulting in radically different circumstances and outcomes. Further consideration reveals a harder truth, the grating realism of a loveless marriage, the overpowering influence of domineering peers and the frustration of dealing with others too spineless or stubborn to heed warnings. As the year proceeds, Leslie manages only a series of tweaks and fine tunings rather than a full service. Ultimately the movie descends into a catalogue of rancour and spite, punctuated by Hayward's drunken ramblings and Basehart's battle with mental health issues. Meanwhile, debonair Tom Conway provides the voice of calm and reason.
It's all professionally performed and fairly polished, but like the similarly styled, Velvet Touch, (1948) overly talky and mannered. It's not pretty, but it's not gritty either and you almost yearn for someone to break a leg in the literal sense to register some points on the action chart. For all its laudable intentions, not least the imaginative premise, Repeat Performance comes of as stiff, stilted and frankly too stagy....dahling.